Alberta Health Services, Analytics. “Alberta Emergency Department (Urban) Operational & Performance Dashboard.” (2018) [Dashboard showing median and 90th percentile results for the length of time between when a patient arrives in the emergency department and when they first see a doctor for assessment, by facility, acuity (CTAS), month, and quarter]. AHS Tableau Reporting Platform. Retrieved from https://tableau.ahs.ca

Understanding “time to see an emergency doctor”

When patients arrive in the emergency department, a nurse assesses them (triages) to decide how urgently they need to be seen by a doctor. All emergency departments across Canada use the same criteria to determine patients’ level of urgency.

The chart above tells us how long patients waited in the emergency department from when they were first assessed by the triage nurse, to when they were first assessed by a doctor. The wait time for patients to see a doctor can be affected by many different factors, including the urgency of other patients, how efficiently the emergency department is functioning, and how many hospital beds are occupied. For example, time in the waiting room can be slowed down by other emergency patients waiting longer for CT or x-ray results to be available, or by patients in the emergency department waiting for a hospital bed to become available.

For patients whose urgency level was “1 – Resuscitation”, because the emergency department staff’s focus was on life-saving care, the data for patients’ time to see an emergency doctor may have been recorded after the patients’ care was completed and is an estimated time of when the doctors first saw the patient. Therefore the wait times for this very urgent level of care may be shorter or longer than what is captured in the emergency department and is shown on the website. For more details, please see the methodology page.

When there are differences between the wait times at different emergency departments of the same size or in the same emergency department over many months, it is a flag to ask why. If wait times are getting longer, this information can start a conversation among staff, managers, and patients about possible causes and opportunities for improvement.
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For the Queen Elizabeth II Hospital in Grande Prairie and the Northern Lights Regional Health Centre in Fort McMurray, there is no data available prior to April 2016. For a description of the reasons, please see the “exclusions” in the data dictionary for this measure.

Results from May and June 2016 are not reported for the Northern Lights Regional Health Centre due to the forest fire that affected Fort McMurray and forced the closure of the Northern Lights Regional Health Centre.

The Health Quality Council of Alberta uses the Alberta Quality Matrix for Health as a way of organizing information and thinking around the complexity of the healthcare system. This measure can be used as input to assess the emergency department’s performance in these dimensions of quality: